


Hello, Nowhere

by f3tid



Series: Antebellum Underground [1]
Category: Left 4 Dead 2
Genre: Dark Carnival, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Gen, Gratuitous Violence, Hello Nowhere, Multi, R/E, R/N, Realism, The Motel, f3tid
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-21
Updated: 2014-04-08
Packaged: 2018-01-13 13:22:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1227949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/f3tid/pseuds/f3tid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A procession of tired feet marched on through the water and through the gore. All that remained of that wretched, blood-soaked night were the fallen bodies left to fester in the coming storm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. For The Night

Night fell upon them in a hail of fire. The gurgling cries of the undead were snuffed out by the remorseless underside of a baseball bat. The sickening  _shuck_  of bone and innards slid off the bat's length and soured the air. Death's stench was everywhere. Coach wrested the wooden club from the pulpy mess smeared across the floor and perched it upon his shoulder. He ventured further into the motel room. His footsteps were soundless.

A procession of narrow spotlights followed the hefty man, poring over the room with cursory strokes. One light centered on the chasm in the wall between rooms. Cautious sounds of scavenging heralded the disappearance of another light as its wielder ducked into the bathroom. Coach's flashlight maintained a steady pool of clarity a yard or two ahead of him until he chortled lowly and ignited the light fixtures on the nearest wall. A zombie, agitated by the sudden luminescence, scrambled toward him with a shriek.

A spotlight whizzed wildly along the opposite wall. Flecks of blood spattered the surface as the hook of a crowbar cracked the creature's skull with a dull thud. Its body collapsed into a shallow scarlet pool and Ellis met the elder man's gaze spryly.

"I think we dun heard enough noise for one night," the boy mused. His eyes reflected the soft glow of the lamplight with youthful excitement, but his face was weighted by fatigue.

Coach nodded and flexed his fingertips against the bat's neck. "We still got miles a' highway 'tween us and N'awlins, and runnin' on fear can only take us so far. Way I see it, we best rest up here. What do y'all think?"

"Sounds like a bad call, chief."

Both Coach and the young man at his side turned about to face the speaker. Nick knelt before the wreckage of a decimated wall, focusing his flashlight upon the frayed wooden planks stabbing through the molding and littering the floor. He ran his fingertips briefly over the rubble gathered at the wall's base and stole a fistful of chalky residue from the pile.

He stood, suddenly, and kneaded the grit between his fingers. His frown perched on a cradle of facial creases left by his own indignation. His brows knotted skeptically and coaxed the fair wrinkles out from the flesh of his forehead. Rarely since they'd escaped the scorched remains of the Vannah had Nick been anything but angry. Nothing had changed.

Coach cocked a brow. "I'll assume you got a good reason for that."

"We haven't even cleared this place out yet. We – we could be sitting on a goddamn  _infestation_ , for all we know, and your plan is to go to  _sleep_? Man, we've  _got_  to get outta here." the gambler seethed quietly. Absentmindedly, he adjusted the bloodstained cuff of his suit jacket.

"Look, I know we're all beat to shit," Nick relented, "Coach, your leg's been giving you hell for the past half-mile, Ro hasn't slept since that first night in Rayford, I'm nursing the world's longest goddamn hangover, and Ellis here hasn't shut the fuck up about that piece of shit stock car since we left it behind. Nobody knows tired like we know tired, I  _know_."

He paused, affording both the man and the mechanic with an inquisitive glance.

"But would you  _look_  at the size of that hole in the wall?" Nick swept an arm back across the plane behind him, "I don't know what the hell made that thing, and I don't know about you guys, but it isn't in my itinerary to find out."

The elder man shifted on his feet and thickened his stance. He glowered stringently down at the con-man. His lips peeled back sharply, brows furrowed, and fissured the air with an extended forefinger. He allowed the hand still wound about the hilt of the baseball bat to fall to his side. He felt the nauseating warmth of fresh blood smearing across the canvas of his trousers, but pointedly ignored it.

"Well it ain't in  _my_  itinerary to watch one a' y'all get tore to shit 'cause we were too damn tired to keep an eye out."

Nick stole a step forward. "Listen, old man. You  _asked_  my opinion, and I gave it."

Coach stood on the monumental foundation of his feet. The small movement of his knuckles tightening attracted Ellis's attention. Coach's nostrils flared. Nick's skin pulled against the purse of his eyebrows and an irate vein surfaced at his temple. The boy drew his tongue across his lower lip, glancing thoughtfully between either of his fellow survivors, and retreated from the escalating scene.

"When I ask what y'all think, I  _expect_  you'll leave the dumbass ideas out," the large man replied.

"What part of that was a dumbass idea?" the northerner's voice verged on a holler. He forked the space between him and Coach with a flattened palm. "Just because I don't wanna get gnawed on in my goddamn sleep –"

The man matched his companion's volume. "Pressin' on without sleep ain't a dumbass idea, Nicolas? You wanna keep hoofin' it for another twenty-four hours? You be my guest. I ain't  _about_  to make these kids hike ten more miles when they already runnin' on empty. We hurt, we tired, and I'm just about up to  _here_  with yo' difficult ass. I let you pull that shit back in Rayford, but no more, a'right?"

"Oh, you think  _you_ were the one holding me back, there? Is that it?"

"Boy, I suggest you sit yo' ass down before I  _make_  you."

"I'd like to see you fucking  _try_."

Nick approached him, a wiry leer tugging at his lips. He cocked his head askingly to the side with his dense brows pinched and a cheek turned to Coach. In one hand lay a vacantly gazing flashlight, the other wadded into an enraged fist at his hip. Ellis caught the glint of weary lamplight against the handle of the handgun poised in the holster tethered to the gambler's thigh. The boy grated his teeth and watched as Nick's palm grazed the weapon's corrugated surface. His own fingers curled fecklessly at his sides. The mechanic skirted Coach's frame and planted a hand on the aggressive man's shoulder.

"Hey now," the boy began. "It ain't helpin' nobody to –"

Sounds of struggle drowned the mechanic's words. The clamor of items clattering to a tile floor predicated an unearthly snarl. A distinctly feminine yelp resounded, followed by the impact of flesh against flesh. There was a brief gap in activity, and the three men dispersed from one another. Coach prodded toward the bathroom, his expression contorted by grief. Nick jerked his shoulder out from under Ellis's hand and slid the magnum from its holster and into his work-worn palms.

He paced shortly after the group's leader, shadowed by the boy. Another bout of preternatural growls resounded. A screech was extinguished with the merciless slice of a heavy blade. And a second. The chaos grew silent with a final, chilling crunch. The residual gurgle of displaced guts made the air unbreathable.

Moments later, Rochelle emerged from the bathroom with a decrepit ankle wedged between her hands and a body towing along after it. Sweat and blood trickled along the curvature of her face. The fabric of her shirt was saturated in red. Her hair had since fallen free of the bun tied tentatively at the base of her skull and swathed across her shoulders and back. She hauled the corpse over the threshold with a grunt and released it from her grasp. The woman turned, eyes alight and breath tending to the ache of her lungs.

"You guys wanna _try_  to keep your voices down?" she posed to the room. She nudged a coarse lock of hair aside with the back of her hand.

The men relaxed their weapons and stood aside as Rochelle moved into the fray.

She gestured to the lamps mounted on the wall. "Oh, the lights work? Great, so we've got power and running water. Now, it doesn't look like we got much in the bathroom, but there's toilet paper and some ibuprofen – always a plus. Anyone wanna tell me what was so important that you guys started screaming and woke up that stiff I had to deal with in there?"

Coach's shoulders collapsed with a heavy sigh. His eyes fell to his feet and he acknowledged the gambler with a flick of and outstretched palm. "Nick an' I was just talkin' on the issue of us puttin' up here for the night."

The woman exchanged a wary glance between them both. "Well, what about it? Is there a problem?"

Coach turned toward the hole affixed between rooms and shared a contentious scowl with the man at his flank. Nick watched through narrowed eyes as the large man disappeared into the inscrutable shadows beyond the gap. He shook his head. Ellis motioned him nearer as he lobbed a lifeless leg over his shoulder, intent on removing the bodies from the motel floor. Nick complied with a snarl.

"Not no more, there ain't," Coach replied. He watched as the man fell in at the mechanic's side.

* * *

"Hey, look here!" Ellis exclaimed as he spilled from the open bathroom door. "Y'know that big ass hole we got 'tween this room an' the other? Well, we got the  _same_  damn thing in the bathroom over here. We got ourselves some adjoining rooms an' shit! Damn, if that ain't cool."

Rochelle and Coach glanced up at the boy from their places around the room. The eldest had reclined stiffly across the mattress and dressed his bum knee with a sheaf of gauze. His fingertips were coated with blood dried by the attentive, sweltering Georgia sun. He clapped his hands to either side of his leg and looked to Ellis. He seemed to attempt a smile, but the ache of his bones only made the age and the sleep on his face more apparent. Rochelle rested an AK-47 in her lap, running a wad of cloth along the barrel. Her small fist sat idly on the weapon's stock as she met Ellis's eyes from the floor.

"Is it clear?" she asked. Her voice was a labored imitation of itself.

Nick tiptoed through the hole in the wall to join the others. He propped a shoulder against the nearest wall.

Ellis chuckled. "Wha – a' course it's clear! Ain't no zombies gonna snack on me. Ro, you oughta come see. There's a whole 'nother bed in there an' everything. I checked."

The woman sighed, smiling. "Good work, sweetie."

"Yeah.  _Great job_ , Spit-shine," Nick remarked tersely and folded his arms, "We got three beds and four people."

Coach hefted his shoulders with a great deal of effort. "Then I reckon y'all gon' have to share."

"Excuse me.  _'Share'_?" The glimmer of amusement that reamed across Coach's eyes was not lost on the gambler. Nick propelled himself off the wall. "There is not a snowball's chance in hell I'm sharing a bed with Billy-Bob Fuckwit over here. I'm a grown-ass man, Coach. No deal."

Coach shrugged. "Well you sure as hell ain't bunking with me."

"Yeah, no shit."

A smile unfurled unto Ellis's lips as he adjusted his cap. "I don't mind sharin' a bed with nobody. Hell, it'll be just like summer camp.  _Man_ , fifth grade was the shit."

Nick threw a vitriolic glance at the eldest of the group.

"For the love of Lusitania, guys, can we go  _one_  night without this infighting bullshit?" The room was replete with the sound of Rochelle's voice. " _I'll_  share with Ellis. It doesn't have to be a big deal."

"What?" Nick bit back.

"You and Coach are the only two that won't budge about the sleeping situation, so Ellis and I will just room together. Three beds and you two can each have your own. Everyone's happy." The woman explained.

The strain of sleeplessness made her features seem sad. But even in the weakness of the lamplight, Rochelle's caramel colored eyes smoldered. Warmth absolutely drenched everything about her. Though she did not smile, her mouth was inviting. She stood from the ground and held herself on bowed feet, her gun held carefully between hands clasped before her.

Ellis stepped hesitantly nearer to her.

Nick tightened his brow at him. "Ro, c'mon. You're not gonna share a bed with him."

"Well it's you or me, Nick, and  _I_  wanna sleep more than I want to fight."

The gambler erupted into protest. After a full minute with nothing but Nick's baritone to color the air, with the obligatory few interjections by either Ellis or Rochelle, Coach rose from the mattress and contested him. Their words grappled and their voices collided. The air was rife with the sounds of a verbal war. Rochelle and Ellis eventually retreated to the furthest room with their weapons tethered to their backs.

Rochelle rejoiced in the sensation of a bed beneath her back. Ellis dropped the mess of guns onto the bureau and propped Rochelle's ax against it. He turned to her and attempted a consoling word.

"Gosh, Ro, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to start nothin'."

She silenced him with a humorless laugh and sat forwards. The mattress wheezed under the woman's weight as it disseminated across its plush surface. With a small and kindly movement of her hand, she patted the space beside her. Ellis took a seat on the bed and tossed his cap onto the nightstand.

"Don't be sorry, sweetheart. If not the rooms, it'd be the next damn thing. Nick just wants to fight, is all."

"And Coach?"

Rochelle's brow tensed. She offered the mechanic a hollow grin. "Coach is…he's a big man. He's the kind of guy people listen to when he's got something to say, which is great in our situation. But the trouble with that is: Nick's a big man too."

The callous thud of heavy feet against the floorboards resounded from two rooms away. Coach shouted. Ellis envisioned the tired wrinkles that bunched up on the man's forehead when he knotted his eyebrows together. His voice would tear through a room like thunder. For a moment or two after Coach let loose, everything would be still. He'd holler to hell and back, but the compassionate gleam of his old brown eyes remained. An instant later, Nick responded. His volume built off of Coach's.

Ellis watched quietly as the gentle creature beside him took a brief pause to wait for the havoc to die down. "And the thing about big men is that they're used to being heard. So when two guys who expect to be heard suddenly have to talk over one another, they feel like they've gotta start shouting."

The mechanic quirked a brow. He pressed the undersides of his hands into the mattress and fell back unto them, head tilted and pale eyes looking incisively into hers. "And it don't ever stop?"

"Oh no," Rochelle rescinded.

Her gaze tilted down as she shook her head dismissively. A gentle, joyless giggle lilted from somewhere under her thick brown locks. Though he had no reason to, Ellis was faithful in the thought that she was smiling. Genuinely. And he smiled back, although she could not see him.

"It will. It definitely will." She said.

A subdued pop engulfed the string of hotel rooms as Nick threw open the front door and its handle collided with the asbestos coated outer wall. The unearthly shriek of the wayward undead pealed into the night.

"Hey, we ain't done here Nicolas!" Coach shouted after him, "Where the hell you think you goin'?"

" _First watch_ ," Nick snarled. He squeezed off a shot and a subhuman squeal fissured the air.

The zombie fell from the balcony with a sickening crunch. The tempest of bitter sound and ill will was sealed with a monumental slam of the door. Coach's labored steps heralded the end of the discussion. He sighed in his grand voice and the bedsprings squeaked beneath him as he took a seat upon the mattress he'd claimed as his own. They'd pick up again sometime later, all four of them knew.

Ellis and Rochelle watched each other in the thickness of silence. Unease was etched into her expression. The smile and the tired laughter had all but gone.

"Somehow," she added.


	2. Cry

"Aw, what the  _hell's_  got me?!"

Dawn arrived in a downpour of gunfire. The metallic reverberation played across the ridges of the motel's porous outer walls and disrupted the suffocating silence of a world devoid of sentience. The heavens were a reservoir for dribbling shades of orange and pink, defiled by colorless clouds. A divergent bird's song twittered on the autumn air. Another bullet tore from the chamber with a roar.

"Well, damn! You  _saved_  my ass. Nice shootin', Nick." The words clung to the air with a definitively southern drawl.

Nick wagered a brief glance in the mechanic's direction. Whether it was the exhaustion or his natural aversion to the boy flanking him, the gambler didn't care. His face felt heavy. He waggled the magnum in his hand by the hilt and made for the door.

"Whatever," he grumbled, "Just quit getting pounced on, already."

Ellis lobbed himself up from the floor. He tailed the debonair shadow in the doorway and drew a large hand against his own clavicles. He tentatively wrought his neck, testing the freshly bruised skin beneath his fingertips. His gentle eyes snagged over his shoulder on the inert and upturned pair of legs illuminated by daylight as they vacated the room. He coughed thoughtlessly against the dense plumes of smog that fled out after him.

He chanced another glimpse in Nick's direction. "Hey, should I get that Smoker outta here?"

"Just toss the body over the balcony and try not to hit any of the cars," Nick droned as he inspected his magazine with a cursory stare. "And cover your damn _mouth_ , Ellis. It's germs that got us into this mess in the first place."

The mechanic met the gambler's distant frame with a jaunty laugh.

"Shit, dude, you ain't get it yet? Man, we done slashed ourselves through blood and chunks a' goddamn  _people_. I tell ya, yesterday night, I wiped a piece a' some dude's brain right up off ma damn face like it was nothin'. We are immune as  _hell_."

Ellis contemplated quietly beneath a boyish grin.

"Hey," he spoke up again, "I'll be right back, brother."

He slapped a hand to Nick's back and wheeled about toward the hotel room to collect the remains of the Smoker. Nick's shoulders hiked and he glared out into the vastness of the highway. A heavy scowl caused the wrinkles in his forehead and cheeks to resurface. Pinpricks of discomfort and resentment for the boy stabbed at the place where his palm had been. The gambler seethed quietly behind a cruel expression, and popped the magazine back into his pistol.

" _Fuckin_ ' great." He said, and shoved himself away from the balcony.

* * *

The door and wall collided in a calamitous explosion of white paint chips, dust, and splintered slivers of wood. A gargantuan footprint lay impressed upon the door's inner surface – a signature of Coach's handiwork. The large man emerged from the shadowy motel room with two corpses snagged on either of his shoulders. A third was wedged between his arm and his ample side. He strode over to the fetid balcony and shrugged himself free of the bodies. He let fall the bat encircled in his fist and lofted the last of them over the ledge.

He winced slightly at the deadened thud of them piling up on the asphalt below. He stooped down, a painful scowl on his face, and tossed the bat about between his fingers again. He straightened and wiped his nose with gloved knuckles. The bodies had gone, but the stench remained. He fixed his attention upon an audible struggle a few doors down.

The door obstructed it all, for the most part. He heard the frantic underscore of trouble. Rochelle gasped. He heard a shriek well up and die before it was able to mature, to expand. Furniture fell and something scrambled across the floor. The door flew open and a pair of arms lashed out along with it. Black and corroded fingernails dug into the unseemly green turf and towed along a rotten figure. Its skull dragged against the floor, and just as it rose to meet the daylight, an ax-head forked it in two.

Gelatinous bits of bone fragment and brain erupted up from the ground. It splattered perversely against the balustrades. Petrified curls of peeling lead-base paint were defaced with errant drops of dark red. Chunks of spongy tissue clung momentarily to the yellowing footboards overhead. They transmuted like liquid, molding against the flat plane of the ceiling and ebbing into amorphous little rivulets. For half-past the instant, it rained blood and brains.

Coach bunched his brow and glanced up and around in disgust.

Rochelle jammed her heel into the fallen zombie's shoulder blade and pulled against the ax handle. She pinched her brows and clamped her eyes shut. The dull blade shifted backward by only centimeters. Mounds of bloody gray matter fell in collective clumps from the open wound and onto the ground. She jerked her head away and yanked again. It came free unclean.

She frowned and smeared blood across her cheek with the back of her hand. She sidestepped the corpse. Her breath was anxious, vehement. She met Coach's eyes across the hall. Her expression was vulnerable. The vaguest hint of moisture pooled at the corners of her eyes.

"All clear," she quietly said.

"Yeah, I think that does it for the top floor," Coach replied. There was an effort to the comfort in his voice.

He tried to ease the shudder of Rochelle's shoulders and the frightened dilation of her pupils with words and only words. The hefty man gestured as though he'd console her, his hands at the ready. He took a fraction of a step closer. His fingers flexed away from his weapon. His eyebrows spilled into a solemn, sorry shape, and he frowned knowingly down at the woman. She flinched.

He resigned.

After a heavy silence, he hobbled over to her and helped to lob the zombie's carcass over the ledge. It fell to the ground, just like all the others. He gave a hard and dissatisfied look over the balcony. He could feel something like solidarity as Rochelle touched his arm gingerly.

"You need a break?" she offered. Her voice wavered, and she seemed fearful as she hugged the ax to her chest.

The football coach shrugged. He approached the veranda and leisurely propped up his elbows. He surveyed the motel with new perspective. He didn't smile. There was history in his eyes.

Rochelle let the ax rest against a wooden pillar and joined the man at rest.

"I think I like this place better at night." She sighed. She stroked at her upper arm with one hand.

The large man made an inquisitive noise. "Yeah? How d'you figure?"

"Well,  _that_  was still a mystery," she replied.

The woman gesticulated toward the pool bed at the center of the lot. Coach knitted his brows. Charred bone and flaky skin rested there in a morass of people – not all of them zombies. He swallowed something complex, and didn't avert his eyes from the makeshift mass grave. Just watched.

She spoke lowly, and grew progressively more wistful, "And it felt more – I don't know. It felt a lot like the way things did before. I mean, it's normal to stop off at a motel after a long day on the road. Sure, ours was a little more literal, a little more  _necessary_ , but still. For a little while, staying up late and talking in a motel room with lots of road behind us and some more in front, felt normal. It was nice."

Miles of silence separated the two. Coach's fingertips kneaded one another. Variant bruises, dirt, and ash weathered his hands. He wrung them thoughtfully against the shoddy wooden ledge, his eyes inspecting the land sprawled before him. His gaze hitched a time or two upon the billboard hoisted high above the motel and all of its squalor. It wasn't unnoticed by the woman beside him.

"You see somethin'?" she asked as casually as she could.

Coach rounded his shoulders with an achy, guttural noise. "Last night. The Suit took a long watch an' when he woke me up to take ova', I decided to poke aroun' a li'l bit. Hauled my ass up that ladder on the far side an' checked out the billboard."

"What'd you find?"

He swiveled to face her. His brows perked and rills emerged upon his forehead. His voice was little, then, and he seemed to shelter his words with his body. Rochelle mirrored his reticence. They conversed gently around something fragile and unspoken.

"Sniper rifle," he divulged. It was almost funny to hear Coach's tremendous voice charade as something little.

Rochelle's eyes widened. She took a step closer and brought a hand to her lips. " _Jesus_. Loaded?"

The older man nodded. "Gotta few shots left in it. Think it must'a been left here when the military pulled out or got jumped by zombies – whatever it was. I was hopin', after we clear out the motel, we could look around for some spare ammo. Watch'd be a hell of a lot easier with a sniper posted up there."

The man jerked his head toward the grated panels of the billboard. Stationary it stood, all at once reaping sunlight and nothingness. The slightly blanched advertisement watched the highway. It saw only miles of wreck, ruin, and road. At one point or another, it had been an ambitious notice for the Midnight Riders' latest profit vehicle. There, it remained an afterthought. Every moment of daylight bleached and baked that billboard further and further unto decay.

"Does Nick know?"

Again, he nodded. "Showed 'im how to disassemble it this morning. I stashed it in the dresser. I'll hafta show y'all how to use it right later on."

The woman pursed her lips, puzzled. "Were you planning to tell Ellis, or…?"

Coach chortled softly. He swung the bat up and racked it across the valley between his shoulders, fingers curled on either end. Stealing a few measured steps down the hall, he obliged Rochelle to follow. She instinctively cranked her hands about the ax handle and wielded it mindfully at her flank.

"Listen, li'l sister. Long as we bein' honest, the boy's a li'l weird," he muttered as though the boy was in earshot.

Rochelle watched across the parking lot as Ellis dropped the body of a wayward few zombies off the furthest corner of the motel balcony. He poised his hands on his hips and loosed a busy breath. His capable chest caved, but his shoulders reamed strong across the framework of his torso. Shadows casted distantly against the muscle protruding against his flesh. His tee-shirt draped snugly against his chest and midsection, loose just about at the hips. He tipped his head and yawned, shifting to relieve himself of his cap for the moment. He unfurled a hand and blocked the sunlight from his eyes with his hat's bill.

He eventually found Rochelle's stare and grinned. He shouted something unintelligible across the chasm between them, and waved his hand enthusiastically. The woman smirked and batted her fingers back.

"Not to say he ain't useful or nothin'. I ain't sayin' that at all." Coach amended, "Ellis is good help. He's a decent shot, makes everyone comfortable 'cept Nick. Li'l goofy, but the boy's pleasant as hell. I'm just thinkin' that if we gon' trust him with a military-grade piece a' artillery and he loses focus, that's our asses right there. I'll teach him. Most definitely, I will teach him. But separately. So he ain't got nothin' to carry off with, y'know?"

"No, I understand. I think that's a good idea." Rochelle drew her attention back to the man in front of her. She tested her next words anxiously before speaking, unsure everywhere. "Coach, you…you haven't talked with Nick since yesterday, have you? About your argument and everything?"

Coach's expression tensed. The leisure had all but left him, and he was cold again. "Let's finish clearing this side a' the motel. 'Sooner we done here, 'sooner we can clean ourselves up."

Rochelle pursed her lips against one another. Her jaw clinched.

"Okay."

And she jogged ahead.

* * *

Ellis settled for that reserved little smile she gave from across the way. His hand fell naturally as Coach and Rochelle pushed on down the corridor. He swept his eyes across his immediate surroundings, smelling the persistent stench of rotting flesh, old linen, and that enduring musk that all dusky roadside dives seemed to have. He peered over the ledge clandestinely. He drank in the image of the mutated corpse, skin rife and gray with disease.

Its limbs lay limply. Arms sprawled out gruesomely on the parking lot floor. One leg broken, contorted grossly behind its back. Its head and face consumed by painful looking boils. The entirety of the dead thing's body was covered in them. Its cord-like tongue unraveled on the asphalt like worms after rain. The boy frowned. He wore his heart plainly on his face.

"Four days." he murmured, "God damn."

Whatever ran through the mechanic's head was severed by the venom in Nick's voice. His encumbered shouting wracked the entire floor.

"Ellis, get your ass in here! I need some help!"

Ellis darted. He wheeled around and picked his crowbar up off the floor of the previous room. He sprinted further down the hall and kicked open the door muffling the total fracas. The metal bar slid between the boy's hands on a sickly mixture of sweat and blood. He sucked air in between his teeth.

Nick grappled with a zombie in the bathroom doorway. His spine was flush against the archway. Rills of perspiration cascaded down the sharp ledges of his face and the valley between the corners of his eyes and his hairline. Violent lines were drawn at the edges of his mouth, torn in twain by a feral snarl. He held the creature at bay with the point of an elbow and the crook of his hand. He jammed his arm laterally against the thing's throat and buried his fingertips into its cheek. The zombie's jowls snapped inches from his face. Murky driblets of spit and blood spewed from its maw and spattered across the gambler's cheek. He jerked his face aside.

"Ellis, buddy?" Nick shouted through tautly clinched teeth, "I need your help for just  _five seconds_!"

The boy tightened his fingers around the crowbar. He stole a step toward the doorway.

"The hell is your gun at, man? Shoot 'im." Ellis tugged on the bill of his cap.

" _What?_ " Nick shouted. The zombie lunged forward, agitated. "How the fuck should I know? This mouthy motherfucker jumped me and it flew outta my hands. Just –  _fucking help me!_ "

Ellis grinned. "Don't worry, brother, I got'cha."

Nick grimaced all the more. He wrested the zombie back by the mandibles and shoved its head as far away as possible.

Ellis reared back and raised his dominant arm high. He rent the air with a metallic swish and hacked into the creature's skull. A bloody rupture expanded on one side. Both men stole a moment. They glanced between one another and the injured body still pinning Nick to the doorpost. His shoulders lapsed.

He almost smiled, cocking a brow in the mechanic's direction.

The zombie lunged forward and bit savagely at the air, flesh, and fabric before it. Nick panicked. He plunged his elbow further into the beast's throat. He cringed at the wet sensation of the point of his arm breaking the thing's rotten flesh and sinking centimeter by centimeter into its gaping larynx. He coughed to ward off the vomit.

"Jesus  _Christ_  !" Nick gagged. "Not dead yet! It's  _not_  dead yet!"

The crowbar tore into the mangled bone and brain with its bi-pronged metal teeth. Ellis imbedded the hook into the zombie's skull again and again. He struck with all the voracity his young body could accrue. His knuckles paled against the metal. Globules flew into the air and onto his skin. The stench was unbearable. He threw too much energy into the final hit, and he and the living corpse fell to the bathroom floor.

Nick borrowed stability from the doorway at his back. He watched Ellis sail through and onto the linoleum.

The zombie sneered. It tried to nip up at the boy from the ground, but its efforts died with the body. Ellis sunk the crowbar's teeth into its forehead. He straddled the corpse, but fell to his haunches. His spine was rigid. His shoulders pooled over his chest and he fought for air. Something like laughter bubbled up from the depths of his stinging lungs.

"Well, shit," he panted. "I guess we're even, huh?"

A hoarse, organic noise engulfed the room like water. It welled up from the floor and swelled. It pooled from the furthest right reaches of the bathroom and set walls awash in a loathsome, angry tide. It surged and it rippled. There was something restless and irritated in the color of its tone. It displaced gravel and stirred up a fine black dust in its wake. The noise waned like starlight. It was feminine.

It drowned everything. It disrupted from the inside, like dirt beneath the fingernails. Then suddenly, it roared.

The shower curtain snapped free of the suspension bar. It gave weightlessly. An emaciated female body sprung out of the tub and towed the curtain along with her. Her fingers were long, nails like red soaked knitting needles. One rotten, bare foot snagged on the parapet. She fell to the floor in an osseous heap, but kept scrambling on broken limbs and bloody fingers.

Impossibly fast, she bypassed the pulpy mess on the floor. Rot coated the thing's knobby knees. Blood trickled from her sobbing, shrieking mouth. She streaked the air with scissorsome fingers, and devastated the living flesh of the creature on the bathroom floor. Ellis's legs kicked frantically against the floortiles. The monster alternated between nominal and probing slices with her hands. Her voice wracked the air – a midmorning siren amid gunfire and idle conversation.

Ellis shielded his face with one bare forearm. He glanced up at the Witch with glistening eyes, brows knotted in terror. His gaze collapsed unto his midsection. Lacerations, deep and shallow, lay in beds of purple bruising. As she continued to attack, bits of flesh and blood reamed from the cuts and lay across his stomach. He swallowed. It went down like razor blades. He thought of meat.

The Witch wadded her shoulders and screamed. She knelt forward and took a bite out of Ellis's skin.

" _Shit!_ " Nick shouted.

He slid to the bedroom floor and scrambled for his gun.

* * *

Rochelle sprinted down the hall with Coach at her heels. Fright pulled one leg after the other. Time threaded her fingers to her ax's handle. Her veins strained against the flesh. Blood pulsed deafeningly in her ear. It bleared her vision, dizzied her steps. She chased each toe after the other atop the artificial green turf. She felt her heartbeat in her eyes.

She heard Coach's labored breath somewhere in the nebulous realm behind her. She beat the door open with the blunt end of her weapon. The fluorescent bathroom lights cast a beam from its doorway to hers, surrounded by darkness and dust on either side. The room was a spyglass. Ellis's prostrate frame was caught in the latitude and longitude of it all. The Witch's screams drew on.

"Ellis!"

Nick pelted the creature with bullets. He knelt near one of the beds with his crosshairs narrowed on the thing's head and chest, intermittently.

Rochelle slipped an AK-47 from the strap suspended from her shoulder. In the same, brief motion, she cast the ax from her grasp and into Coach's. He nodded at her as she dove forth to join Nick. She sprayed a barrage of lead and crackling gunfire from the small and graceful beds of her hands.

"Fuck,  _fuck_! I'm reloading!" Nick shouted over the monsoon of sound.

"I got you!" Rochelle shouted back.

Four of her bullets ripped through the Witch's ribcage. The wounds exploded ivory splinters and coated the hind walls in scarlet. A loosened slab of bone fell to the floor. Another shot. The bullets punctured her shoulder and she stumbled away from the young mechanic.

Ellis dug his fingers into the bedroom carpet and dragged himself away with a tired fraction of effort

"Oh, God." The boy choked repetitively. "Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God…"

At the heed of Coach's hand, Rochelle hinged her finger at the trigger. The bullets stopped. The guns stopped roaring.

Coach thundered into the bathroom. He was conscientious in his gait, and avoided the fork in Ellis's legs. He did not acknowledge the morbidity of the young man's legs splayed feebly in a pond of his own blood. Instead, he curled his chalky fingers against the neck of the ax. The Witch emitted a squeal and she drove forward on contused, skinny legs.

He struck her in the chest with the ax blade. Her feeble body hitched at the solar plexus and she thrashed against Coach's momentum. He crushed the Witch's ankle underfoot and pried the ax free of her chest. He withdrew and hewed her injured shoulder with the blade as he came back. He wrested her again. Again, the ax came down without mercy.

She swung out in a final fit of rage, and Coach wrested the Witch to the ground. He crushed her head with the dull end of the ax head, and shuddered at the lamenting sadness in the zombie's dying cry.

Nick fell back and rested against the side of the mattress. He closed his eyes, tilted his head, and breathed. He cradled his magnum somewhere between his chest and shoulder.

Rochelle threw the gun out of her hands and skittered across the floor on her hands and knees. She took the young man's face between her hands and affixed the most comforting lie she could muster to her expression. She felt the disquieting clamminess of his skin beneath her fingers.

"Talk to me, sweetheart," she cried smilingly, "You're alright."

She touched her brow lightly to his.

"Aw," he rasped drowsily, almost laughing. "Ro, mama, don't cry. S'just a scratch."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Disclaimer:** I, in no way, claim ownership of any of the characters, venues, merchandise, or the like of the preceding piece of fiction. I am not involved or incorporated with Valve or any other company owning the rights to the Left 4 Dead series. That said, my words are my own, and I exert and express full ownership of my prose. Plagiarism is not cool. Any references to real-world institutions, establishments, popular culture, media, etc. are completely circumstantial.
> 
> **A/N:** My sincerest thank you's to all who read, subscribed, and favorited. Your attentions are never unnoticed! And keep an eye out for the next update. I don't want to spoil anything, but I'll definitely be making good on that M rating in the next installment. Thanks so, so very much. Feedback is infinitely appreciated, as always.
> 
> \- f3tid


	3. Vultures

His chalky fingertips curved gently beneath her flesh. Perspiration gathered on her face, her shoulders, her breasts, condensing into minute pools on canvas but never quite descending. They magnified the purple welts that marred her neck. The shallow ponds of past transgressions and clotted blood glimmered in pristine spheres of water, sweat and effort. Her eyes were closed with jaw ever so subtly slack. He watched her parted lips warily, chapped and unyielding to his touch. He inhaled sharply through his teeth.

The small, protrusive lines that swelled beneath the skin cast shadows across his fingers. Like cogs, his bones fraternized and grinded. Strands of dark brown hair draped lankly across his forehead. A wince resounded from somewhere in the back of his mouth. He moved again.

Atrophied limbs resisted as he pulled. Nick's hands roosted at the crooks of the body's underarms and saline rivers trickled down his cheek. The aft of his forearm nudged his gun's grip. Muscles yanked taut against the bone. He expelled the tension from his sore and able arms with a thick and angry grunt. The man purged the nadirs of his chest with the depth of his voice, the sound singing the very texture of his throat.

Nick relented, eventually, and abandoned the body's shoulders in favor of practicality. He took a half-step and rounded the cadaver's side, shaking an arm free of his coat sleeve. The fabric had since been sullied by a laundry list of excretions – undead and otherwise.

He scowled in mourning of the swatch of white cotton, now a deplorable shade of greenish brown, as it slid across his arm and gathered at the wrist. Electric pulsations of disgust set the gambler's nerves aglow as he felt the unwieldy wetness of damped fabric through the veneer of the suit's floating canvas. He stole his eyes away and shrugged the jacket off with some urgency.

He paced idly backward and turned his focus upon unsheathed arms. Mechanical memory drew buttons from their shirt cuff hidey-holes. With routine folds and the curling of fingers, he rolled his sleeves up to his elbows. He glanced back at the corpse from an awning of downcast brows, frowning. He smeared his hand across his face and spun to face the bathroom doorway.

"What am I looking for, again?" he called.

His hand cascaded across the moderate whiskers ornamenting his jaw. He dipped his thumb in the dimples shy of his chin, and melted his hand down his neck. He scratched the bed of his hairline, the thin scrub speckling his skin and delving beneath clothing.

Rochelle chuckled conservatively at him from the other room. He unclasped a button or two from the collar of his shirt.

"Short attention span?" she jabbed.

He snorted.

"Check for med supplies and sedatives," she advised almost sterilely, like she hadn't pinched a boy's skin between her fingers to hold a wound closed long enough to stick the needle in. Like she hadn't taken a twenty-five minute shower to wash someone else's blood from her skin. "Ellis is all patched up now, but those stitches are gonna hurt like a bitch when he wakes up."

There was a chafing noise that overcrowded the sound of her voice. A zipper was being undone. She had to have moved on from searching the pile of bodies and settled upon the gear. He smirked a little, imagining her squatting on her toes to avoid the bloodstains on the floor. Holed up in the only bodiless corner, he mused. Clean and showered, and still she had to endure the grunt work. He nudged the girl's body aside with his foot, and kneeled before the bathroom counter.

"The kid used up just about all our medical stores already." Nick complained as he threw open the cabinet before him, "At this rate, if a zombie so much as yawns in our general direction, we're fucked."

"Don't be dramatic." She admonished, though he could hear the smile in her words.

Nick smiled back and snatched an overnight bag from under the sink. "Honestly, I think we're pressin' our luck the longer we stay here."

The gambler pressed a shoulder into the doorway between the bathroom and bedroom. He peered beyond the shabby wooden molding and down unto Rochelle's frame, crouched just where he thought she'd be. She glanced cursorily at the finds splayed about her on the floor. One small hand rested upon an unraveled sleeping bag and the other tickled the air with fainéant fingers. He tossed the small pouch in front of her. She looked up at him with an expression colored with a blend of expectation and relief.

"It's a defensible position."

"Yeah? What else did Coach say to try an' sell you on staying?"

"He didn't have to sell me on anything," she spoke sharply through plush, ungentle lips. She peeled back the zipper and hesitated. "Ellis isn't gonna be on his feet any time soon, Nick, you saw him. If we have to stick it out for a few more days to let him rest, I'll do that."

He traced her fingertips with eloquent strokes of his pupils across her skin. He saw the mechanical hitch that stunted the movement and seized her knuckles. He watched morality pour salty conflict into her eyes, and sink her lips like sails from ships.

"Move over."

She slid aside hospitably. He fell to his haunches and pressed his back to the wall behind him. He filled the ethical void around her with his presence. Something innate pled for him to glance to the left and find her smiling. He sighed and instead threw a discarded backpack over his lap. He unzipped it with greedy fingers, searching. Anything to busy his hands.

The gambler felt unwarranted attention on him as he scoured the rucksack's entrails with both hands. Rochelle's eyes conjured mobile growths beneath his skin. He scowled at the sensation. With her gaze, the mutations mobilized and crept about in the insufferable perdition between flesh and sinew.

He remembered days unending, spent in the Nevada swelter. He remembered shutters clamped tight and barricaded doors. He remembered the intentional prison he'd made for himself there, years ago. The sensation of sentient things rearing and clawing about under his flesh erected the hairs on his arms. He felt paralysis take him by the pits of his lungs, and grow outward like vegetation reclaiming the earth. Vomit teemed at the back of his throat. A fleck of sweat materialized at his hairline. Withdrawal came crashing back like so much spillage after pulling the trigger. He nearly heaved.

"Could you not?" the words wormed free of his tightening throat.

The woman pinched her shoulders and stared back into her lap, embarrassed.

"Sorry," she muttered, "I don't mean to stare I just – I don't know if I'm comfortable doing any of this."

Nick cinched his brow. "It's no different from loading up at safe houses. Just take what you need."

"It is, though," she protested meekly. She hadn't so much believed the rationale, herself. "The stuff in the safe houses is there for people to take. It doesn't belong to anybody."

"Well, if you haven't noticed, there's a pile of bodies directly in front of us. 'Nother one, even bigger, in the pool. Matter of fact, just a few hours ago, we were clearing those things out of the rooms like roaches. This place was clearly overrun. You wanna find out whose shit this is? Point. There's a good 10% chance you're not wrong."

An exasperated breath collapsed the solid build of Nick's chest. He waited until his lung's burned before he accrued enough nerve to look at her again. He swiveled his head and slicked his hair back with the heel of one hand. She looked back at him, immovable in her conviction. He almost laughed.

"Did you steal a lot before?" she asked.

Nick studied her expression for a long few moments. She was soft, genuine. Not judgmental.

"I don't know if I'd call this stealing. Back then, the things I did were just for me. For…for my benefit," the gambler relaxed a little into his words, "But whatever we find here keeps four people alive for one more day, and that isn't what stealing's about. Well, not to me, at least."

Rochelle contemplated the creases in her palms. He wanted her attention again.

"And by the way," he added licentiously, "In times of crisis, it's called looting."

She giggled. She didn't attempt to hide behind a cupped hand, either. The corner of his mouth twitched, neither transmuted into a smile or a frown. He was caught someplace between amusement and apathy, most days. He watched her laugh a little harder than the joke was funny. She cherished the little joy with her lips, measured it with ivory teeth and the boisterous femininity that seeped from her mouth in glorious sound. He unfastened another button from his collar.

Her voice sacrificed itself to silence after a while. They set about searching without haste or concern, trawling through paper boxes and things they'd have thought consequential, before. Rochelle celebrated upon discovering a travel toothbrush and razor blades. Nick crammed a nearly empty box of cigarettes into his pocket. They'd scavenge both the bags and hold onto them for convenience's sake, but the infant victory of three cylinders of tobacco was more hope than Nick had seen in days.

"Hey," Rochelle plundered the quiet. She turned to him suddenly, a youthful shimmer to her eyes. "Wanna play a game?"

Nick smirked. "Not unless your next word is 'doctor'."

She rolled her eyes. "Shut up. I meant Twenty Questions, like to get to know one another."

The gambler weighed her proposal with a downcast gaze. He considered everything down to the cadence of her voice, the slight twitch of her brow as she'd said it. He prodded his tonguetip against the inside of his cheek and wrung his hands. She was okay. He glanced back over at her, roved his eyes about her slender neck and pert mouth. He regarded her smile and the touch of sincerity to her eyes. He marveled discreetly at the consistency of her complexion, its smoothness, its warmth. He wondered what it might feel like beneath his hands.

She was okay.

"Alright, shoot." He conceded.

If at all possible, her smile grew. Her cheeks pursed into rounded cliffs, elevating further and altering the contour of her face. She turned away from him and tilted her hips, straightened her spine. Her hands flattened against the floor between her crossed legs and she searched the ether in front of her for the question she'd pose. Nick's muted chortle rumbled in his chest.

"Okay, um," she tilted her head thoughtfully, "What were you doing in Savannah when the zombies hit?

"A brunette."

Rochelle's expression was chastisement enough.

Nick chuckled reservedly and drew his palm across his face. He supported his arm on bended knee and affixed his eyes to the corpse mound before them. The precision of his stare blunted. Remembrance sketched the lines that accompanied his smile.

"The plan was to go to Atlanta for a buddy of mine's bachelor party. I figured I might as well make some money along the way, so I booked a casino cruise. It was a good couple days, took in a bit a' cash and screwed plenty of people over to get it. I'd just taken this girl up to my room – cocktail waitress, 'bout as sharp as a fuckin' soccer ball, you know the type – when we heard screaming in the hallway. Next thing I know, two guys are dead and the waitress has a bite taken out of her. I grabbed my gun, got off the boat, and followed the screams 'til I found the evac point at the hotel."

"What was her name?"

"You're assuming I knew it."

Rochelle festered in playful anger and she threw a fist into Nick's arm. He knotted his brow and fended off a wholehearted laugh, leaning slightly away. She shook her head and gazed down at her lap again. Humor tugged at the corner of her lips, and she let herself smirk.

"God, you're such an asshole," exhaustion tinged her voice as it eked from her chest. Gravity bent the frayed edges and muddied the line between satire and severity. And yet, her face was soft.

He sized the woman up from the corner of his eye. "Okay, my turn. What're three things I couldn't tell just by looking at you?"

The query seemed to put Rochelle at ease. She held a hand up delicately and pinched each finger in correlation. "I didn't lose my virginity until I was 22, I got my hunting license before my driver's license, and I was a bartender my last two years of college."

Creases arose upon the flesh of Nick's forehead as he raised his eyebrows in surprise. "Really? 22?"

"Well, don't be a dick about it."

"Aren't you 28? Holy shit!"

"Moving on," Rochelle steered him astray with a cautionary tone, "What was up with you and Francis back in Rayford?"

The gambler laughed haplessly. "I could ask you the same thing."

"Nick, seriously."

The producer transferred her weight to the flats of her hands as she pressed them against the floor. She rose gracefully from her cross-legged position and rode her hips about to face the man at her side. Rochelle nudged her boot soles together, slender legs now folded out in front of her. Her shoulders shrugged up attentively below her ears and her earrings slanted to accommodate the muscular knolls beneath her shirtsleeves. Her shirt's collar dipped against her chest, replete with the pressure of stable arms on either side. Flesh beckoned flesh.

Nick distracted himself with easier subjects of thought. Instead of imagining the denim peeling from her thighs and ending in a messy heap around her ankles, his mind mimicked the sound of the biker's jagged, earthy voice as he withdrew words from the pits of his lungs and wielded them to Rochelle under flickering lamplight. He rid himself of the vivid imagery of naked frames and just first names. He replicated Rayford's damp brick walls rife with bloodstains, mold, and signage. For every errant memory of the woman's timbre consumed by euphoria, broken by physical strain, he thought up one more brick and added it to the reconstruction of that torrential Georgia night.

He grazed her collarbones with eyes conspiring. "The guy was a slimy bag of shit and he talked too fucking much. I've hated guys for less."

"Now that's not fair," the young woman rebuffed, "Those three were nothing but helpful to us the entire time we were in that town. In fact, we'd still be there if it wasn't for them."

Nick eased the muscles in his neck and fell numb against his shoulders. The back of his skull joined the length of his spine as he rested it, too, against the motel room wall. "You asked meabout that vest wearing douche-reservoir. He's a greasy god damn animal and I wanted to knock his teeth out one at a time. That's all."

He sighed and pulled his knee in all the closer. "At least the other two knew how to keep their eyes to themselves."

Rochelle retreated back onto her hips. Her expression was completely vacant. "You're kidding. You have got to be kidding. Nick, you almost knocked that man out for-"

Nick unclenched his hand and held it up to the air, rank and humid with decomposition. "Hey, why is it that the first time you bring up Rayford since we left it, you wanna talk about that piece of garbage biker?"

"Because –"

"No, I'm serious. Why the hell is that leather sack of valium and scotch what you wanna fucking discuss above all of the other shit that went down that night? Yeah, I hate him. I friggin' loathe that guy, Rochelle. Is that what you wanted to hear? Did you wanna know that the way he talked to you made me wanna peel my skin back with a kitchen knife? What, do you get off on the idea of me wanting to bash his face in with the ass-end of my gun every time I caught him staring at you? Is that it?"

He had since reeled his head to look at her. His cheek lay tucked against the astern wall. Domineering eyes bore into her from under the hood of an aggravated, tight brow. His lips curled the more he spoke, as though ceding to his acrid bite. Chestnut strands slipped free of the messy quaff that spanned the peak of his forehead to his neck. He had not straightened his back nor sucked in a breath, and still, he was gigantic.

"Because God forbid, Rochelle, that we bring up something of substance. Some—some fuckin' thing that we'll actually have to deal with at some point. You weren't thinking of Francis when you were sobbing your fucking eyes out over Ellis and that dumb Zoey broad, were you? You weren't thinking about him when we stayed up and drank after everyone else went to sleep. Bet he didn't even cross your mind while I was finger fucking you behind the bar. Did he?"

He threw his knee to the floor and crawled nearer to her. The features of his face, grizzled and fatigued, were mutated by rage. Rochelle's legs sprawled out on either side of him as he stole ever closer. She supported herself with two palms flush to the ground behind her back.

"Did he?" he demanded.

Rochelle cursed herself for the cathartic moisture that brimmed at the corners of her eyes.

"Fuck you." She finally said.

His gaze bore profoundly into hers for an instant. Frigid wells of grey ignited with the inhospitable smolder of the young woman's caramel eyes. Her manicured brows swept up and creased above the bridge of her nose. She looked up at him with pupils dilated, periphery blotted into incongruous clouds of nothing. With a noncommittal gape, she ravaged the landscape of his face. Her heartbeat faltered as the veins surfaced against the semi-elastic pull of his flesh. His upper and lower lip flirted across the modicum of space that divided them. His eyebrows twitched, but maintained their resilient tension.

He sank forward on his hands and knees. His fingertips kissed the insides of either of her wrists. He cocked his head and bypassed her waiting mouth, her cheekbones, her jaw. Instead he halted at her ear, naked before his lips, and dragged his tongue across the chapped plane of his lower lip. He dipped closer to her, his facial hair grazing her skin.

"Sweetheart, I wish you would."

It sounded like a cruel impersonation of himself. The reverberations tined his throat and pilfered whatever empty space there may have been between his chest and hers. He spoke like broken asphalt, not yet bespoke by the sand. His breath dissipated warmly against Rochelle's ear. It foretold hours of slippery skin and aching sin, and gathered hotly in the center of her ear. She closed her eyes briefly to feign composition.

Rochelle pressed her face to the gambler's and turned as patiently as she could, slaking cheek to cheek and relishing in the rough, anticipatory splendor as the bridge of her nose scraped against his jaw. She inhaled the sweetly pungent scent of sweat, toil, and days-old cologne, maw agape and a strangled groan teetering on the tips of her teeth. She lunged in the slightest of movements and gnashed her them against the man's ear. She breathed with the entirety of her chest, a gasping gentleness tapering each exhale to a close.

Nick's eyes widened. He retreated half a pace and tipped a brow at her, bent at the elbows and allowing the woman to look down upon him. He imagined his earlobe slipping between her teeth and bit his lip, smothering something feral. He watched her eyes for a fraction of an instant before he clamped his teeth down hard upon her neck and took her hips in his hands. He pushed her, recumbent under his palms, callously against the wall and smirked at the dull thud that resounded thereafter. She gasped.

Her fingers unfastened the remaining buttons spanning the length of his torso. She slid her hands along either hemisphere of his midsection, running the knolls of muscle against the undersides of her fingers. She trekked the mesas of his pectorals, rubbed greedy circles into his clavicles and stroked the keys against the sculpted masses of sinew between his shoulders and neck. Then, she descended. She raked her fingernails against his chest and towed them down mercilessly to his waist. He wrinkled his brow and growled through his nose, refusing to release the skin pinched tight between his teeth.

He situated his grasp of the petite creature's hips and hoisted them into his waist. Her upper body slid down the wall and onto the floor. Her head towed along violently, even impacting the extrusive floor molding. He brought a hand to her shoulder and pushed her shirt sleeve further down the subtle curvature that lay. He scraped his way from neck to deltoid and swathed the flesh there with his tongue. He dipped the fingers of his other hand below the hem of her jeans, palm flat against her belly. She squirmed beneath him, eyes closing rapturously, as he teased her superficially with a thick and haughty hand.

He retracted his hand, pressed a kiss into her shoulder. He reoriented his fingers and popped the button of her jeans out of place. With some assistance, he managed to work them over her hips and half-way down her thighs. She reached to adjust them, but he murdered the movement with the tilt of his hips. Rochelle threw her head back and a vulnerable mewl tumbled free of her lips. With a limited range of movement, she attempted to grind against the telltale bulge straining against his trousers. He chuckled, and turned her over with ease.

"Tell me what you're thinking, gorgeous," he murmured as he admired the sight of her on her knees.

"I…I can't –"

Nick busied himself with loosening his belt, but bent forward a bit and breathed against the teeming center of the woman's underwear, offered to him on buxom hips and trembling lips. Rochelle braced herself against the wall and whimpered. He smiled and kissed her through the fabric. He glanced down and tugged himself free from his fly.

With a few laps of his tongue and a roomful of listless moans, Nick shifted and eased the elastic waistband of her boyshorts down her thighs and into oblivion, as far as he was concerned. He took himself in his fist and poised the tip of his penis against her, pelvis rocking ever so slightly and her voice inciting icy tides against his spine. The gambler released himself from the palm of his hand and ran from base to head against her dribbling cunt. He clamped his eyes closed, incapable of restraint when faced with the sensory bedlam that was the woman beneath him.

He ran his fingers beneath the hem of her shirt and peeled it across her curves. She deferred to his ministrations, and helped him shed the garment from her shoulders. The man reared his head back on his own shoulders, and then leant forward to collapse his forehead upon her back. He increased his pace, sliding between folds and slathering himself in torrid wetness. His teeth embedded in her skin when he felt her hand encircle him, grip and glide him faster against the inside of her thighs. He pulled away from her spine and marveled as her flesh took form once more, this time embellished with the marks of his incisors. He chortled again, absently kissing whatever skin rest beneath his maw. He grunted. Her hand tightened around him.

"Fuck," he hissed, "Ro, tell me how you want it. I'm not gonna be so personable here in a minute."

The woman rolled her hips in response. Nick laid a path of licks and aggressive bites along the grooves of her spine until latching onto the back of her neck. He stroked aside the locks of coarse black hair from the plane he'd claimed with his mouth, slipping over her shoulders. He worked the skin at the nape of her neck between increasingly forceful teeth. He bit down sharply, suddenly, and Rochelle cried out girlishly. He grinned. Her pace hastened all the more, and he bucked fruitlessly against her clit. The tilt of her head only fed him more of her neck, more of her spine, more of her voice, more of herself.

"Twenty questions," he groaned against her vertebrae, "When's the last time you got fucked?"

She didn't answer quickly enough. He jerked with an upward sway of his hips.

"Just before Savannah!" she yelped, "God. A-a week ago."

He yanked himself free of her fist and guided her onto her feet alongside him with his hands. He spread a palm against the small of her back and nudged her closer and closer to the wall. She raised her arms, molded her hands to pock-marked surface and pressed her cheek against it as well. Pressure built in the gambler's fingertips and he tilted her pelvis to meet him. He dug the fingertips of his right hand into her hip, and slipped the other beneath the underwire of what felt like some fairly elaborate lingerie.

He dipped his spine to better accommodate her stature, and pressed his nose to her neck. He drew his tongue along the well-defined line of her jugular and flicked it against the inside of her ear. She pressed the back of her head into his bare chest and wriggled a bit as he pushed into the valley where her thighs met. Her moans reverberated against the framework and he shuddered noticeably against her body.

"You ready?"

Nick tapped one of her legs aside with the outer edge of a scuffed black wingtip. It gave perfectly at the knee, still bare, with her jeans bunched around her calves. He held her leg in place with his own knee, and pressed further against her. Her flesh, cathartically trepid and slick, yielded to his heat. His veins seared and swelled beneath the skin, the rhythm of his heart thrumming against her cunt to the tune of something dangerous. He grated his teeth, throbbing.

"Please," she answered.

He rammed into her remorselessly, and tossed his head back in rapture as she screamed.

Rochelle punctured the wallpaper with desperate fingertips. She groped at the surface for a grip – anything to anchor her, and fortunately found nothing. She buried her nails into the wall and pressed her forehead upon it as well as she hissed and sighed through taut teeth. Her eyes fell dormant and she rocked easily on her hips, meeting the gambler thrust for thrust, stroke for stroke. One of her hands snaked down the length of her body and settled between her legs.

He scraped his fingernails against her hip and snapped her urgently against him. His resolve dwindled with every thoughtless gasp that fell from the ledge of her plump lower lip. He gazed appreciatively down the slope of his nose and found selfishness lying there, plainly, on the bend of her spine, those heart-shaped hips. He molded himself to her back and drank hate from her neck in stolen kisses.

They were a spectacular collision of flesh. He whispered cuttingly against her tendons and tightened his hand against her breast. She arched her back and reveled in the internal fire that ignited from her own contortion. His head prodded hungrily against her insides, ravaged her physicality from the inside and the out. He retracted his hips, dropped his forehead to the gentle hill between her neck and shoulder, and panted.

She turned slightly, perplexed and disdainful for the opportunity to breathe. "What're –?"

"Turn around."

She wrinkled her brow.

"C'mon."

She made a frenzied half-pirouette and he caught one of her legs with his hand. He knelt slightly, kissed her forehead, then migrated to her collar bone. The gambler licked and caressed an undefined line from her chest to her thighs and halted there, on his haunches on the floor. He seized her by the bootstraps and, with a clumsy couple of kicks from her legs, liberated her of her sartorial bonds. He bit his lip thoughtfully, then nipped at her inner thigh. He flicked his eyes skyward, contemplating the art of bare skin and the store-bought lace that hugged her breasts. He paused, then pressed his tongue flat between her legs and slurped his way back to her neck. She quaked.

The producer's knees inverted and touched at the caps. She plowed the carpet with restless toes. Her spine mimicked the wall's flatness as the man strafed her with narrowly cinched teeth and the roughness of his hands. He crushed her immaculately between his body and the aging stucco behind her. He relaxed and flexed his digits against the curvature of her calves, then hoisted one leg over his shoulder. She grasped desperately for him, cupping her hands about his jaw. She stroked the ungentle divots in the corners of his mouth with her thumbs, and tucked her brow against his as his hips rocked against her once more.

She smeared the sweat that accumulated upon her forehead across his as she turned her face against him, overwhelmed. "Nick…"

He rooted his fingers at her waist and groaned at the flavor of his name upon her tongue. The gambler breathed gruffly against her lips. He feverishly broke his pace, leading an onslaught against her captive hips. His eyes fell closed and he inhaled the saline scent of the woman, victim to his touch.

"Nick," she repeated.

Listless satisfaction dripped from his maw. It reeked of graceless masculinity, and only slightly distracted from the ambient noise of a room replete with the sounds of flesh crashing against flesh. He ground himself raw, trying to impale her ever further. His fingers tightened. His pulse surged against his eardrums like tides upon the shore. He was only partly aware of her frantic gasping as her chest heaved against his. He fished blindly for her other leg, and it soon joined the other in a fluid arc against his shoulder blade.

"Nick!" the woman shrieked.

He held her firmly between both hands, and hammered her tailbone into the support beams. The gambler relished the vague and fleshy reverberation. He rejoiced in the feral orchestra of conquest and meat. He shifted, and clamped his teeth against Rochelle's earlobe. He had lost cognition, running on instinct.

Rochelle's fingernails sank mercilessly into his shoulders and neck. She left four streaks of crimson in her wake as she towed her hands toward his chest. Her muscles convulsed violently, errant against his length. She held him in place and smothered him with mounting pressure and inconstant spasms. He crashed his forehead into the crook of her neck and shook as he met his satiation. Peculiar and unintelligible noises wracked his chest and hers, coupled with the intensity of respiration and surprise.

Nick peeled open his eyes and blinked a time or two again. His vision was blurred and pulsated in concurrence with the racing of his sated heart. He retracted from her shoulder merely by the inches, uncertain that he'd survive beyond the snugness of her cunt, the warmth of her arms, the burning sensation of her nails against his skin. He smirked, and closed his teeth gently against her jaw line.

"What is it?" he mumbled.

She tilted her chin toward the ceiling, and let him scour her neck with his lips. "You're the worst."

He chuckled, grazing his teeth over fresh abrasions of his creation.

"I know."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Well, I promised gratuitous sex and 5,000 and some odd words later, I delivered. As always, feedback is tremendously appreciated! Until next time.
> 
> \- f3tid


	4. Hunger

**Hunger**

Rochelle saw the future in a three car pile-up. Contorted metal eclipsed the sunlight in an eight-foot mound laid there, lifeless and unapologetic on the tar of the highway. There weren't any limbs, no blood, and that ameliorated at least some of the sickness stewing in the pit of her stomach. She turned toward the whisperingly warm breeze, and tested the air. Singed rubber, gasoline, and the rancid smell of decay greeted her on an idle wind. She was unsurprised.

She tightened her fingers against the wooden cylinder leveled between her hands and walked. The soles of her feet felt new as she plodded carefully between vehicles and forgotten debris. She'd missed a few days' miles from clearing the lot with the boys and scraping for supplies. The woman had tasked herself with ransacking and scrambling for the ever-insufficient stockpile. Her dawns and afternoons had all come to run together on the fibers of a twenty-four hour canvas. The reservoir of her perception – maybe all of their perceptions – was running dry, bereft of yellows and oranges and useful daytime colors. The nights dragged on for always. Like his fingers slaking across her ribcage.

She fitfully swung the ax over her shoulder and sidestepped an overturned bus. She raked the surface of her lip with her teeth, wincing. Her body screamed under even the mildest stress. Fresh, wine-colored splotches adorned her neck and chest, her hips, and the unseen inside of her thighs. The ambient sounds of sex overcrowded her weary mind.

Rochelle felt the telltale quiver of her spine. A tickly itch roused a bit in the pit of her stomach. She felt the fullness of Nick's hip against her hip, and quite suddenly the emptiness of their food stores. She looked ahead at Ellis and his sinking cheeks. He was injured and hungry and rebelliously happy. Her eyes melted down the tan swatch of skin at the nape of his neck and watched the big bloodstain on his back, daring it to recede as he walked on in front of her. She glanced back down at herself sourly. Clean.

She'd never been very good with watercolors, anyway.

"Whoa shit, Ro, you seen this?" Ellis exclaimed, dragging his thumb across his chin. "Looks like this bus played chicken with a freight train. Damn."

Rochelle affixed her eyes to the bus's hood, compacted and defaced by twisted metal. Her brow twitched and she glanced anxiously behind her. She took a noncommittal step nearer to the mechanic and surveyed the damage.

Opaque droplets of liquid leaked from vents in the bus's grill, beaten and misshapen. It pooled into a shallow pond of strong smelling moisture on the asphalt. The pool expanded for a great few feet from the wreck, darkening the ground and spreading the foul fumes of gasoline. Tire marks rounded a distance around the bus, and beyond its bend lay hundreds of barren cars at a forever standstill. Upturned soil lined the embankment where a ravine's slope began and the tire tracks ended. A toppled car lay in a ditch further on down the road. Sunlight glinted off of a catalytic converter turned up toward the sky.

She swallowed hard and snagged her eye on the sunshine. "Must've swerved to avoid what was in the road."

"Well it ate shit, that's for damn sure," the boy chortled, and placed a hand upon the knotted sleeve of his work jumper, spanning the narrow of his hips.

He glanced over his shoulder at Rochelle, his eyes tapered under harsh dayglow. "Think there's anything left inside?"

"In a bus? Probably nothing like we're looking for," she concluded, tightening her lip. "We should definitely check the cars, though. They're packed with people's lives – or as much of their lives as two arms can carry. We'll just…I don't know, pop open some of the trunks and look for food. Can we do that?"

Ellis's brows tensed and twin creases surfaced at the bridge of his nose. "What, open trunks?"

"Without setting off alarms," she appended.

"Oh, hell yeah," the boy affirmed with the most convincing smile. "I bust cars apart and put 'em back together every day. And these bastards are abandoned; shouldn't be no trouble."

He paced a ways from the wreck and over the median. His work boots' dense rubber ridges scraped the dampened pavement with an almost inaudible sound, and yet it droned against Ellis's ear with every drag of his heel. That ageless autumn breeze doused his exposed skin in cold and unrest. His cheeks and his earlobes and that rounded nub of the crest of his nose flushed. He reddened and shivered covertly behind a neighborly word, a courteous smile. He spread his arm out, inviting Rochelle to the nearest car ahead of him.

She tilted her head up and nodded, then stepped between Ellis and the empty sedan before him.

They hunched clandestinely around the passenger side window like fireflies to a slow burning fire in its hearth. His shoulders sank and her palms, wound tight around an ax handle, sought refuge for a moment or four, rested on the tops of her thighs. He glanced down at the window and greeted his reflection warmly. He stole a moment or two to watch the expectancy mature on Rochelle's face, and smiled a little selfishly as she waited on his word.

His chest swelled proudly and his stitches ached. He coughed into the backside of his hand to mask a beaten groan.

"Let's do this one. Now, somebody up n' bailed this car, right here. Ain't no keys in the ignition and the windows are even rolled down a li'l bit, which is lucky for us. Well, really, for you. See, I got these big ol' hands that ain't gon' get very far through that crack in the window. And you…"

Diaphanous blue eyes descended from the portrait of man and woman reflected in the window to the little body at his side. Denim bunched up a bit at her bent knees. It teemed at the rim of her boots and hugged her figure a little looser than it had on the hotel roof, all those days ago. Her chest spilled over her lower body, buttressed by idle hands laid softly in her lap. Thick dark locks dangled over just one of her shoulders and in her face. He caught himself staring at the rounded shape defined by the strap of her bra and the capped sleeve of her shirt, collapsing against the curvature of her upper arm.

Ellis mimicked the proportions of her arm and his gaze fell obsequiously between her fingers. The sensation of smiling soaked in his stomach, but his mouth was unmoving. A simple purse of his lips incurred the words.

"Your hands are small," he marveled so quietly.

He glanced back up into her eyes after a long reprieve.

The woman released the tense grip she held on the wooden staff and propped it up against the car's front wheel. She snaked her hand in through the crevasse and bent her elbow against the glass. Her fingers unknotted and cascaded until she was able to meet the lock module with her fingertips. After a brief few failed attempts, she locked her thumb and forefinger around the small plastic knob and tugged. With a telltale pop, she removed her arm and yanked open the passenger side door. She stroked soothingly at the indentations left in the crook of her arm.

"Lucky for us," she said, smiling.

Ellis watched the subtlety play on her expression from under a hood of thick brown eyelashes. He mirrored the gesture with a flash of his teeth.

He pressed his knee down upon the upholstery of the passenger seat and pitched forth into the sedan's interior. It reeked of time. Bits of dust baltered around in the air, illuminated by the sunlight pouring in through the driver's side window. The dashboard was a bleak, empty plane. Streaks of mud and mire encrusted the floor. The back seats lay barren, save for a lonesome and long-since abandoned car seat buckled in under the left side window.

The mechanic exhaled his relief. He shifted his weight and fell back onto his feet, outside.

"We're clear," he sighed and adjusted the bill of his cap, "Can't open the trunk from the outside, on account a' the keys bein' gone, but that middle seat in the back opens up. Pop that sucker open and we can grab whatever we need from the back."

Rochelle pushed the hair from her face and sank into the car on her hips. One of her brows hiked as if pulled by a string. She cocked her head and surfed the vehicle with her eyes.

Her heart eased its frantic thumping, comforted by the presence of so very little. She smoothed her spine against the dash. Her fingers intertwined idly, folded on top of one knee. She turned to face the mechanic again, this time with a credible calmness pooling in her eyes. The producer stretched her mouth wide.

"Actually, I…" she asserted too weakly, "I think I can handle this one."

He smirked. "Hell, alright. I'm gon' hit that minivan down the road, a-ways. Holler if ya need anything."

She drew back into the passenger seat and watched him ebb away in the rearview mirror. Her chest deflated and she bit her lip at the acidic gurgling of her stomach. She tucked her chin to her chest and breathed a while, snagging the will to move on only an afterthought. Hooking her legs over the center console, she dropped to her knees in the backseat.

The portal to the trunk fell open to a miasma of rot. Rochelle pinched her nose and her throat cinched taut around the pungent scent of death. She buried her nose and mouth into the crease where her elbow met the bicep and turned urgently from the compartment. Tears nipped at the corners of her eyes and her brows threaded harshly against her skin. She coughed her throat raw before she was able to resurface and flood her lungs with heavy, tainted air.

" _Jesus_ ," she wheezed, and swiveled to approach the trunk once more.

Shadow spilled across moist and graying flesh. Chunks of meat met Rochelle's eyes from a gaping maw. Dried flakes of blood caked a little chin and dribbled down a neck with folds of youthful skin. Intricate taffeta and pink plastic buttons lay weighted by filth. Band-aids littered the tiny fingers that tore out at her from the darkness.

Her heart constricted. Lungs emptied. Its fingernails scraped her chest.

Matted curls tossed about the air. The little body flung itself at her, clawed and snarled at her face and neck. Its fingers hitched in the coarse locks draped about her shoulders. It jerked her face near and snapped its teeth against her collar.

Rochelle shrieked and wormed her hands beneath its jaw. Her face contorted in horror and she clamped her eyes shut. Her nails imbedded into cold and bloodless skin and she concentrated her strength into the pads of her fingers. She felt the slaking and gasped as the zombie's neck pulverized in the palms of her hands.

Its head fell at a gauche angle and the tip of its spine jutted against the flesh. The clammy grip under her ear and in her hair tightened, however, and its little jowls crashed more violently toward her neck. Its walleyed gaze fell somewhere at her cheek. Rochelle winced, a tearful brook stemming from one eye.

She bunched her shoulders, stacked her hands squarely against its chest, and jammed the beds of her hands into its solar plexus. Light spilled in through the arc between their bodies, forked from the tip of its ribcage toward its lopsided skull. Rochelle straightened her arms and lobbed herself into the driver's seat. Her back smoothed against the steering wheel and the horn blared. It orchestrated a thousand heartbeats as the zombie pounced over the center console and buried its teeth into Rochelle's thigh. She screamed and reared back against the wheel. She gathered one leg against her chest and jammed the heel of her boot into the monster's eye. She retracted and dug it back in, momentum eventually driving its chin to the sky.

"Oh, _fuck,_ " the producer wept with the intensity of a whisper.

She lunged stomach-first into the passenger seat. Her heart pistoned against her chest. Her breaths pelted against her ears like six-shooter discharge from a frantic finger. Her legs swung out gracelessly as she dove from the car and slid against the asphalt on her side. She racked the ax handle before her breast and screamed as the zombie toppled onto it. The wooden handle dammed its throat and it struggled to widen its jaws around the girth.

Rochelle cinched her eyes and rolled onto her knees, pinning the thing to the ground with all of her weight. She wrenched the ax from between its teeth and swung it high overhead. The zombie squealed and reached with either of its chubby little arms. Its fingers splayed, some broken.

The crimson blade eclipsed the sun and its immutable shadow doused the child's frame in black. Its milky, featureless eyes gleamed against the dark and it choked a little on a mixture of bile and blood. Its fingertips grazed Rochelle's arm just as the ax came down. It cleaved a gap in the center of its face. Rochelle dislodged it and swung again. This time, slicing off a corner of its skull. Again. Blood seeped into its hair. Again. Its eye ruptured. A breach opened up across the socket. Once more. Shards of the lachrymal spewed into the air.

She encircled either of her fists round the staff and yanked. The ax head burst free of the spoils with a puckered smack. Rochelle shuddered, threw the thing to the ground and pressed her palm flat against the scythe-like end. She rounded her spine and retreated into herself, sobbing. She clamped her eyes tight and took comfort in what little warmth drenched her cheeks.

"Ro?" Ellis's voice cut at her ears, "Ro, what the hell just - ?"

He hiked the straps of either of the bags on his arms up to his shoulders and shrouded her frame with his hands. His breath beat against her neck and he summoned her up from the ground. She met his gaze and found a trauma and hunger she could recognize.

"I…I got it," she squeaked and gestured emptily toward the chunks laying at her feet, "I-it was a little girl."

Ellis melted his hand down the curvature of her arm and found a sympathetic frown. He swallowed dryly, wet his lips with an errant tonguetip. He glanced down at the body, limp little hands sprawled on either side, then back up at her. His shoulders fell and he wagered with the words on his lip.

"Here, Ro, I got lots'a stuff to bring back. We can just –"

A tidal wave of otherworldly groans and screeches swept across the highway. His nerve endings pricked and his skin felt uneasy on the bone. He watched Rochelle's pupils dilate and her fingers crank about the rod in her palms.

She sucked in a breath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I apologize for the wait (and also the cliffhanger)! I entreat you to leave me your wonderful feedback. Feel free to favorite, follow, and anything else that you might be inclined to do. As always, much love and appreciation, please enjoy. The next chapter is a son of a bitch. Until then!
> 
> \- f3tid

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I, in no way, claim ownership of any of the characters, venues, merchandise, or the like of the preceding piece of fiction. I am not involved or incorporated with Valve or any other company owning the rights to the Left 4 Dead series. That said, my words are my own, and I exert and express full ownership of my prose. Plagiarism is not cool. Any references to real-world institutions, establishments, popular culture, media, etc. are completely circumstantial.
> 
> Author's Note: I've been playing a lot of Left 4 Dead 2 and The Walking Dead Game, lately. So, it only made sense for me to write the story in an in-depth and more realistic form than is given in the game. Plus, there is just not enough quality work in the Left 4 Dead fiction category, and I rather like the idea of The Motel chapter in Dark Carnival, so I made a thing. I sincerely hope you all enjoy it! Reviews are infinitely appreciated. :
> 
> \- f3tid


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